Daily Lobo columnist
Ali Mazrui says in his book Cultural Forces in World Politics that the gender revolution was intended in Islam but never took off.
According to Mazrui, it got aborted for two reasons: Mainstream Islam turned royalist from the Ummayids onwards as a result of which the harem developed and because the doors of Ijtihad, or intellectual effort, closed.
Recent Western discourses on feminism and human rights in Islamic nations are plenty. They are, however, only partial representations of how patriarchy and Islam collaborate.
Further, the solutions offered to the problem of the "women question" in Western discourse are also problematic. I shall elaborate on both these issues.
Both Islam and patriarchy are products of sociocultural and historical forces. There is no such thing as pure patriarchy. We can, at best, talk about feudal patriarchy or capitalist patriarchy, which again interacts with the history of a people and their nation.
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Similarly, there is no such thing as a pure religion. For example, Islam interacts in various ways with local tradition. In Sub-Saharan Africa, Islam never interacted with classic patriarchy to produce large harems for the confinement of women.
The primary reason for this is in the absence of a feudal structure and serfdom, women's labor was primarily used in agriculture. So women, with varying degree, had some autonomy over land and what they produced. To veil women would be a waste of their labor.
In contrast, in Asia and Europe, where the primary mode of agricultural production was serfdom, the aristocracy had the luxury of keeping women's labor confined to harems by veiling them. This aspect also interacts with class.
The other side of this is that Western intellectuals and Westernized Islamic scholars such as Fatima Mernissi depict a Western-style, secular liberal democracy as the only solution to the "woman question" in Islamic nations.
This is problematic because it rests on the premise that the spread of human rights in the Global South by the Western powers is interest-free. In reality, globalization and the free circulation of Western goods is intimately related to the spread of human rights.
Secularism is also touted as a universal value, whereas in reality, secularism is a product of industrial revolution in the West and may not be the ideal model in many other parts of the world. Further, liberal democracy does not go beyond a certain class and calls for egalitarian resources of wealth.
For example, when the Shah of Iran tried to rapidly industrialize Iran, he sowed the seed of what is called fundamentalism by excluding the traditional bazaar merchants and local traders who, out of sheer necessities of life, turned to Islamic fundamentalism as the only solution for their economic and identity crisis. A part of this was the women of this class reveiling themselves, which was banned by the Shah in his effort to modernize Iran.
This opportunity was seized upon by the clergy and Ummayids as they claimed to be the spokespeople of one authentic Islam and gained power.
The power of Islam lies in its flexibility to vary with local traditions and custom. In Islamic tradition, the land of peace - "dar al-Islam" - is separated from the land of war and strife - "dar al-harb."
For the West, all of Islamic land is "dar-al-harb," which has to be civilized, and the "women question" forms a central issue in this civilizing mission. Neither is there any pure "dar al-Islam" nor can there be a Western solution to the women question.
Women have to carve out their own indigenous ways by using Ijtihad or critical thinking and form an "imagined community" of "dar al-Islam" for themselves translocally as well as transnationally.
Rinita Mazumdar is a lecturer with the women's studies and philosophy departments.
